The MACH micro-kernel is likely to be the basis of the operating
systems of the future (it is already the basis of the OSF and NeXT
systems). It provides a common interface for the operating systems
independent of underlying hardware. In other words, if one can get the
MACH micro-kernel running on one's favourite hardware (this has already
been done for many of the popular platforms) then any software which is
written within the MACH framework will run on it. One of the features of
this design is that Parallel/Distributed computing can be largely made
transparent to the the end-user. The Carnegie Mellon University is
coordinating the MACH project.